A quick deal in a new market can look like a green light for the whole region. It rarely is. Teams pour budget into a motion nobody built to succeed there, pipeline stalls a few months later, and no one can say exactly why.
In memoryBlue’s recent webinar session, “Building Pipeline in New Markets: What the Planning Spreadsheet Won’t Tell You,” three operators who have built pipeline across EMEA, APAC, and North America joined memoryBlue CRO Glenn Haertel to name what actually moves the needle when a company expands into a market it does not yet understand.
Hosted by Haertel, the panel brought together Craig Downing, VP Marketing at Gainsight, who took the company’s customer success motion from the US into EMEA; Nate Thiry, VP Product at BulkTMS (a BulkLoads product), who previously built international sales and partnerships at a small software startup and later at the global accounting firm Forvis Mazars; and Marco D’Ambrosi, Director of Global Business Development, EMEA at Intelex Technologies, who has grown teams across EMEA, APAC, and North America. Over 40 minutes, the four traded the version of international expansion that does not usually make it into a case study: the false starts, the underestimated risks, and the calls they would make differently a second time.
One region is never one market
D’Ambrosi’s read: EMEA is not one market. The UK, the Nordics, the DACH region, Southern Europe, and the Middle East are, in his words, “all very, very much different,” each with a culture that shapes buying behavior on its own terms. “People buy from people,” he said: the message and the tone have to fit the culture they land in, not just the language.
Downing’s read: Every region carried a different level of Gainsight-brand awareness and a different level of customer-success maturity. In some markets, Gainsight could lean on demand capture, because buyers already knew they had the problem. In others, the team had to create demand, making the case for a problem the buyer did not yet know they had, before it could even sell the fix.
Thiry’s read: Moving from a small, speed-focused startup into a top-ten global accounting firm flipped the motion. Forvis Mazars wanted to protect a newly unified global brand, not chase quick regional wins, so the whole approach turned far more risk-averse. Professionalism, he said, is the one thing that travels well no matter which market a company enters.
The false summit: why early wins stall expansion
Thiry’s warning: Early wins feel good, and that is exactly the problem. He calls it a “false summit”: a first win makes a new market look solved, and teams end up “chasing ghosts” of opportunity instead of the real thing. They push harder and ignore the signals to slow down, because the early numbers felt so good.
D’Ambrosi’s catch: A handful of wins in one corner of a region, say the east of the UK while expanding across Europe, does not validate the wider strategy. Teams still have to localize outreach market by market, or the plateau shows up right after the first burst of energy.
Downing’s fix: Build a three-pronged SDR motion: high-touch human reps, a generic inbound program, and a generic outbound program, running side by side, not in sequence. None of the three replaces the others. Keep building the next lever while the current one still works, and the flywheel keeps turning instead of stalling out after the first summit.
The risks nobody puts in the plan
Haertel’s own story: He hired what looked like a superstar sales rep in Germany, then learned a few weeks before the start date that the new hire got 35 business days of paid vacation a year, three of which fell right at the start of the role. A planning spreadsheet never flags that.
Downing’s risk: Some countries require cash in the bank before a company can even open a local entity. Direct sales, channel partners, or systems integrators dominate different markets, and a go-to-market motion, SDR strategy included, has to bend to whichever one rules. Japan’s old model of bundling software with hardware is the extreme version.
Thiry’s risk: Data privacy and data residency rules, especially in India and the UK, can force a company to store customer data on a local server instead of remotely. It is easy to research and easy to miss. EMEA outreach compliance around email and do-not-call rules is just as strict, and real fines follow if a company gets it wrong.
Haertel’s risk: A hiring mistake costs far more outside the US, and the cost of unwinding it changes country by country. Vet international candidates thoroughly, and learn the local laws before anyone signs a contract.
Build, partner, or let AI scale
Downing partnered: He could “respect a beautiful piece of architecture” without knowing how to build one himself, so copying an outbound engine from scratch was never the smart move outside Gainsight’s core market. He wanted one unified portal for recordings, analytics, enablement, and training, not mismatched systems and metrics pulled together before every pipeline review.
Thiry partnered for speed: Forvis Mazars’ international offices ran in regional silos, which made building an internal team fast enough nearly impossible. Partnering with memoryBlue let Thiry put trained, professional reps in front of leadership and say, credibly, “this is who we’re partnering with, and they feel like an extension of us,” once the firm’s IT and background checks cleared them.
D’Ambrosi built: Five years ago, Intelex had no native European-language speakers, and metrics across DACH and Southern Europe lagged. Rebuilding the team with German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French speakers, plus a Singapore hire for APAC, moved every metric, open rates, reply rates, connect rates, in the right direction.
Where AI actually fits: It amplifies a motion that already works; it does not replace the people running it. AI does not replace any leg of Downing’s three-pronged SDR mix. Instead, it narrows a broad audience down to the roughly 4% who genuinely want to talk, so the human conversation that follows means more. Haertel’s summary: use AI to find who to target, sharpen the message, and read the intent signals that say when to reach out, then let people carry the conversation.
What each of them underestimated
Asked what they would tell themselves at the start of the journey, each panelist named something the hindsight version of the story usually leaves out.
D’Ambrosi: Time to ramp. Building the relationships and credibility a new market needs takes far longer than any spreadsheet projects.
Thiry: How fast a sound strategy can still fall apart for reasons nobody controls, and how important it is to adapt fast instead of taking it personally.
Downing: He would push harder, earlier, for a single point of contact, unified systems, and shared training standards, instead of assuming the vendor’s default model would just work, before the phones start ringing.
Haertel: How much value a third-party partner adds to early pipeline momentum, and how expensive and legally tangled a hiring mistake gets once it happens outside the US.
Where international expansion goes from here
International expansion is not getting simpler. Every market still carries its own buying behavior, its own regulations, and its own version of the false summit waiting after the first quick win. The fundamentals have not changed: read how each market actually buys, hold the patience to localize instead of replicate, and settle who does the work, an in-region hire, an experienced partner, or both, before anyone makes the first call.
To hear the full conversation, watch the on-demand recording of “Building Pipeline in New Markets: What the Planning Spreadsheet Won’t Tell You“
